No one said it more bluntly and with quite as much pain in his heart as Raymond Lafontaine.

“There is not one more bloody train that is going to run through this town,” the construction entrepreneur hammered this week in Lac-Mégantic, where he is one of the eastern Quebec town’s most significant employers.

Mr. Lafontaine lost his son, his daughter-in-law and an employee after an oil tanker train owned by Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MMA) Railway derailed in the centre of town and exploded. Moody’s Investors Service said the disaster would likely be North America’s worst rail accident since 1918. In all 28 people are dead. Some 25 others are missing and presumed dead.
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And now they’re concerned the federal government will overreact with calls for further regulations on their industry — something that may be foreshadowed by an announcement Friday by Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Wendy Tadros that the TSB will begin to publish safety records of individual train companies. Ms. Tadros told reporters in the stricken Quebec town that in her experience, crashes are never determined to be the fault of a single person.

While the events of last week were undeniably tragic, they were in no way indicative of any safety deficiencies in the short-line rail industry, said Mario Brault, president of Genesee & Wyoming Canada Inc.

“I would put my safety record beside any other Class I railroad’s safety record,” said Mr. Brault, who oversees the operation of 10 short-line and regional railways in Canada, including Quebec Gatineau Railway, Huron Central Railway, and St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad.

“I wouldn’t be shy at all to make comparisons.”

Each year, he said, his railways move more than 150,000 carloads of steel, lumber and other commodities across Canada on about 2,100 kilometres of track, and he stands by his safety record.

Mr. Brault said he hoped federal regulators would view the events in Quebec last weekend as an isolated incident and not impose unnecessary and burdensome regulations on short-line and regional railways that would impede commerce. He noted Canadian short-lines are subject to the same regulations of larger Class I railroads, like Canadian National Railway Co. and Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd.

In fact, he said, in some ways they are actually safer than the larger players because there is more face-time with employees and the trains move slower and because of that, there’s less likelihood of a major derailment along their lines.

“Smaller sometimes is better,” he said.

Short-line and regional operators like Genesee & Wyoming’s various subsidiaries play an instrumental role in the country’s rail network. CP refers to them as the “special teams” of the industry on its website, likening them to a relief pitcher in baseball or a kicker in football.

“A short-line is our specialty player; when our tracks don’t go somewhere, we work with our short line partners to make the play,” the company’s website reads.

There are about 50 short-line and regional operators in Canada, largely stemming from the National Transportation Act in 1987 and Canada Transportation Act in 1996, which loosened the restrictions on CN and CP for divesting their less profitable and lower-density lines. Thousands of kilometres of rail lines have since been transferred to short-line operators, government agencies and other companies over the past two decades.

The basis for the change was that lower-cost operators could turn a profit on those low-traffic lines in a way the higher-cost structures of the larger railways prevented, said Bob Ballantyne, Canadian Industrial Transportation Association president.

“The big impetuous for them to do that, and to turn them over to independent short-line operators, were really the craft labour agreements” of the big railways under which only an engineer could drive a train; only a track worker repair tracks, and so forth, he said.

“Short lines could really cut back on labour and have people do, to some extent, a variety of jobs,” Mr. Ballantyne said. “That was a lot of the impetuous.”

The short line operators in the country now feed the larger Class I railways with roughly a quarter of their traffic, RAC figures show.

In 2010 (the latest data the RAC has available), short-line operators had combined annual revenue of $650-million, employed 3,000 workers, and accounted for roughly 20% of the total track miles in Canada.

Mr. Brault acknowledged that there is more flexibility in the collective agreements of his unions than at the larger railways — including lower wages and duties — but there are other advantages, including less time away from family, which attracts talent.

“Because we’re more compact in terms of geography, they basically go home every night,” he said.

Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway is one of only two railways in the country approved by Transport Canada to run trains with one crew member. The other is Quebec North Shore & Labrador Railway, a division of Rio Tinto-controlled Iron Ore Co. of Canada.

Transport Canada officials said at a briefing this week that both companies had to demonstrate they could operate those trains safely with only one crew member before permission was granted. All other railways operate at least with one engineer and a conductor to manage the train.

“Our rules and regulations do not stimulate one, two, three members on a crew,” said Luc Bourdon, Transport Canada director general of rail safety, at a safety briefing.

“What you have to demonstrate is that you can work in compliance with these rules and regulations. In the case of one-man operations, a railway will have to provide to Transport Canada the conditions by which they will do it safely,” he added.

MMA had, however, only been operating one-crew trains since 2012, Transport Canada officials said, unlike QSN&L, which has been doing it for decades. Both railways do have the highest number of accidents per year among short-line railways in Canada in recent years, alongside Goderich-Exeter Railway Co. Ltd., according to TSB figures. On average, MMA had 12.1 accidents per year between 2003 and 2012; Goderich-Exeter had 7.6; and QSN&L had 6.6 over the same period, TSB figures show.

QSN&L, and its parent Iron Ore Co. of Canada, declined a request for an interview.

But IOC said in an email safety is its “highest priority” for the railway, and it adheres to Transport Canada’s regulations and rules.

It’s difficult to compare the safety records of short-line railways in Canada simply by looking at data provided by Transport Canada and the TSB that tallies total accidents and incidents per railway per year in Canada for the past decade. The industry standard for measuring rail safety is rail accidents per million train miles and injuries per 200,000 man-hours because that allows an apples-to-apples comparison despite the size of the railways being compared.

Neither Transport Canada nor the TSB could provide those figures, nor the number of miles each railway recorded each year. So, while the TSB figures show a dramatic drop off in the actual number of accidents at MMA over the past decade [23 in 2003 versus six in 2012], in isolation, they mean nothing if there was a dramatic drop off in volumes shipped as well.

The U.S. Federal Railway Administration figures show over the past decade MMA’s train accident per million train miles sat at nearly 35 in 2012 compared to 20 in 2004. But because the number of train miles travelled by MM&A each year is so small, those figures reflect a very small amount of actual accidents, always in the low single digits annually in the U.S.

By contrast, CN and CP, which have thousands of miles of track across the continent and move much higher volumes, had an accident rate per million train miles of 2.25 and 1.67 respectively in 2012.

There are some who argue there has been a steady decline in the quality of training and experience at these short-line railways across North America.

Jerry Marcum, railway operations specialist with consultancy Railex in Sherills Ford, N.C., is one of them. He said over the past 15 years he has seen a significant decline in the amount of experience needed to get a job, and the importance placed on that.

“They would rather hire somebody new off the street, train them for 24 months and replace a guy that’s been there 20 years for half of what he’s making,” he said.

It does seem to be a trend that a lot of rail workers are overworked and not actually on their toes as much as they used to be

This also means there are now fewer managers to supervise, and in the case of one-person crews, there’s little, if any, oversight.

He said it’s a lot of work to tie down a train, and if you’ve had a long day, “you might want to cut a corner” if no one is watching.

“I’ve trained locomotive engineers for years. You can look at that black box and you can tell within five minutes whether that guy did what he was supposed to do according to the policies in place,” Mr. Marcum said.

“It does seem to be a trend that a lot of rail workers are overworked and not actually on their toes as much as they used to be. And you see more incidents like this happen too,” he added.

But Transport Canada’s Mr. Bourdon said the ministry’s inspectors treat short-lines like any other railway, and had been doing regular inspection and audits of MMA prior to the accident last weekend.

Transport Canada officials said they have inspected 514 miles of MMA’s track, 20 locomotives, 37 crossing and 511 of its cars over the past year, he said.

Most industry observers say that whatever occurred at Lac-Mégantic will have to be determined by the investigation into the matter, which is expected to take up to a year to complete.

Until that time, however, operators like Mr. Brault hopes that Ottawa takes a measured approach to imposing any new regulations on the industry.

“We know there is a lot of pressure on the decisions makers in terms of railway regulations,” he said. “We understand that a tragedy like the one in Lac-Mégantic is probably going to trigger a few initiatives.”

“We’re already pretty focused on safety. If the regulators decide to increase their watch and their regulations, hopefully it won’t be conducive to a loss of business,” he added.

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